El Paso Caught in the Middle

Spencer Hsu writes in the Washington Post:

Leaders of this sunny desert city peppered Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff during a recent visit with complaints about trade-crimping border-crossing delays, unwanted calls to enlist local police in enforcing immigration laws and recent deaths of immigrants at the hands of U.S. Border Patrol agents.

“Second-guessers and hindsighters,” Chertoff retorted, defending such agents against critics who he said “have no idea how difficult it is here at the border.”

But to many in El Paso, it is Washington’s understanding of what it means to be on the border that is increasingly in question. As the political stalemate continues on how to revamp immigration laws, the Bush administration has taken aggressive new measures to tighten border security and deal more harshly with illegal immigrants.

And that has El Paso, just a stone’s throw across the Rio Grande from the Mexican boomtown of Ciudad Juarez, feeling even more caught in the middle. “Most people in Washington really don’t understand life on the border,” said El Paso Mayor John Cook. “They don’t understand our philosophy here that the border joins us together, it doesn’t separate us.” Click here for the rest of the story.

bh